


The Blog of Levi Who Is Called Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

by yasaman



Category: Lamb - Christopher Moore
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 19:23:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yasaman/pseuds/yasaman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How do you distribute a gospel in the modern world? After their resurrection, Biff and Maggie decide to try and find out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Blog of Levi Who Is Called Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tjs_whatnot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tjs_whatnot/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy the fic, tjs_whatnot! Your prompt gave me a chance to write one of the Lamb stories I've always wanted to read, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
> 
> Huge thanks to my beta, dropsofviolet, who heroically betaed this at pretty much the last minute. Any remaining errors are all mine.

Divine guidance isn’t really as amazing and awe-inspiring as people would like to think. I mean, there I was, resurrected after 2000-something years, and I got plopped into the modern world with little more guidance than “write your gospel, Levi who is called Biff,” and “the Son of God wants you to go out into the world with the Magdalene.” Now, I was, and am, happy to go out into the world with Maggie. She was, after all, literally the only person I knew on the entire planet at the time, not to mention I was (and am) still ridiculously, helplessly in love with her. But what exactly were we supposed to do in the world, other than go out in it? There’s sex, obviously, and we had tons of that after our return to life. (What? It says it right there in the Torah, “Be fruitful and multiply.”) I think Maggie has really appreciated some of the tricks I learned with Kashmir. But awesome sex and vague divine orders aside, I was kind of at a loss in the weeks after I wrote my gospel. There didn’t seem to be much room in the modern world for an unknown, forgotten disciple of the Messiah.

To the modern world, I’d just be another crazy bearded preacher on the street corner. Granted, I wouldn’t be shrieking about the end of the world, vast government conspiracies, or the evils of premarital sex. But in my travels in this new world, those guys gave me the uncomfortable feeling that I was about three wineskins and a week of no bathing away from becoming one of them. There may have been a time where I aspired to Bart’s career path of village idiot. After my resurrection, I was fairly sure it would just disappoint the Son of God who gave me my marching orders. I figured I’d disappointed him enough as it was.

So how exactly was I supposed to fulfill my holy mission? I looked at this world, and the evils and horrors I saw seemed beyond fixing. What good would my gospel do to help the old homeless men I saw shivering on the streets? Would it end the wars raging in the world? Would it put food in the mouths of hungry children? Would it even move the hearts of those who call themselves Christians now?

The only good I ever did was to stay at Josh’s side. I was far from the most faithful disciple. I wasn’t the greatest preacher, and I didn’t really perform any flashy miracles. Everything I did, I did for love of Josh, and for love of Maggie, and I suppose out of some fear of smiting. But if the world needed a returned disciple who glowed with the light of holiness, who could purify the faithful and convert the unbeliever…well, I was not it.

Joseph told me once, when I was too young to really understand what he meant, that Joshua needed a friend to teach him to be human. What use was that skill in this new world? There was no Josh for me to force humanity on. There was just me, Maggie, and seven billion other people, all human already, more or less. So what was I supposed to be doing? The question echoed in my head constantly after my resurrection: what do I do?

*********

In the months after being let loose on the world by Heaven’s stupidest angels, I figured Maggie and I might as well keep doing what we’d been doing: traveling, learning about life in the 21st century anno domini (wow, a whole _calendar_ system based on Josh’s life, didn’t see that one coming), and, of course, having sex. The traveling, at least, was a lot easier than it used to be, if considerably more terrifying. No camels, which was a plus, but I really couldn’t help but be dubious about traveling long distances in giant metal things traveling at great speed. Seemed like it was asking for trouble, really. At least with a camel, you knew where you stood: it hated you and it smelled vile, but worst came to worst, you just fell off it, and then ran away when it tried to crush your skull. With these cars and buses and trains and airplanes, it seemed like the possibility of gruesome and fiery death was always at hand.

Anyway, the traveling: so we were out in the world, together, thus fulfilling the only really clear and simple part of our holy mission. Thankfully, when Maggie said the angel gave her money, she meant that the angel gave her a _lot_ of money, all connected to this little card thing, which I guess told you how much money we really had stored away somewhere. It was a little like having imaginary piles of gold, only everyone else also imagined you had piles of gold, so really it was like having _actual_ piles of gold which you could trade for goods and services. It was awesome. The money and the little booklets that the gift of tongues informs me are called our passports meant that traveling was pretty easy for us.

It was the figuring out what to _do_ while traveling that was a little more difficult. We spent a lot of time seeing the sights, sure, but Maggie was certain we should have been doing more. Because I’m totally whipped, and because this sort of thing got to be a habit while I was traveling with Josh, I agreed. After a year of our new lives, we were finally to the point where we were a little used to the modern world (no more rocking and crying in terror for me!), so we decided to settle somewhere for a bit to work on our holy mission. Whatever it was. While we hadn’t been accosted by any angels threatening to smite us for not fulfilling our divine mission, my gospel was starting to burn a hole in my pocket, and I could tell it was the same for Maggie. We were running out of reasons to put off dealing with introducing two incendiary new gospels to the world.

Our usual travel strategy was to head to the airport, and hop on the first flight we could. Maggie felt this was less than ideal, but she was as overwhelmed as I was by the hugeness of the world, and I spouted some convincing bullshit about letting the hand of God guide us in our seemingly random decisions (Malcontents 5:13, look it up). For all I know, maybe it did. Maybe Josh was guiding our way when we asked for the next available tickets to whatever city sounded interesting enough.

Incidentally, this strategy did not yield favorable results when I got the tickets on my own. Apparently, looking like I do makes people think I’m some kind of zealot who wants to blow up the plane. Instead, Maggie and I decided to get the tickets together and tell people we were on an adventurous honeymoon. This got us a lot of free champagne and seat upgrades, and me a lot fewer invasive searches.

We were staring at the departures board at San Francisco International Airport, about to implement our guided-by-the-hand-of-God strategy, when Maggie reminded me of our resolution to actually do something about our ostensible holy mission.

“Biff, I think we’ve done enough sight-seeing. We were resurrected for more than a vacation. We wrote our gospels for a reason.”

“Do you have any ideas for doing something with those gospels other than setting up a table and handing out the good word in little pamphlets like those people?” I asked, nodding towards a couple of people from one of the seemingly innumerable little sects of what’s now Christianity doing that very thing in the lobby. Maggie looked like she felt as wary of that idea as I did. We knew enough about the modern world by then to know that proselytization wasn’t going to work. It was all well and good to preach town by town and city by city 2000 years ago, when itinerant preachers and new religious sects passed in and out of favor like the seasons and you could count on some attention and new faithful, but our world was small then. This new world demanded bigger things than travelers telling parables.

“Have you received any answers to your prayers for guidance? Josh sure as hell almost never did.”

I didn’t mention that I hadn’t either. I figured it was obvious, and it’s not like I wasn’t used to it by then. But Josh’s silence and absence were what I could hardly bear. I knew the desperate choice I made before was to give in to rage and despair. It wasn’t the kind of choice I wanted to make again, but I still didn’t know what to do with a grief that was 2000 years out of date, and I didn’t really know how to live in a world without Josh in it. I hadn’t managed to articulate any of that to Maggie, but I think she could guess.

She sighed and took my hand. “No. But let’s at least try something? We’ll stay somewhere a while, and see what we can do. Now pick a place.”

She was being nice to me. I must have looked really depressed. I took another look at the departures board, and chose our home for the foreseeable future.

“The 1:20 to New York City.”

*********

It took a while to settle in in New York. I’ll spare you the tedious details of our first few weeks there. Suffice to say, it involved: acting like country yokel tourists who couldn’t stop staring up at the buildings, getting into a lot of tedious arguments about where we would live and what we would do in the Big Apple, getting a lot of things spectacularly wrong when it came to figuring out how to live something other than the nomadic life we had been leading, and having a few quiet and not-so-quiet breakdowns about what we were getting ourselves into.

When the dust had settled, we sat down at our shiny new kitchen table in our shiny new apartment, and stared at our gospels. Mine was still on the hotel stationery it had been written on, while Maggie had apparently managed to convince her marginally smarter angel to get her more practical notebooks. I’d made a few edits to my gospel over the past year, smoothing out the rough edges that came from being more or less forced to write it while confined in a small space with the stupidest angel, but the stack of paper didn’t exactly invoke a sense of holiness. Maggie’s notebooks didn’t look much better.

“We should have pushed for some scrolls or tablets to write on. Something with a bit more…gravitas. Or holiness.”

“I know your father was a stonemason Biff, but I really think chiseling out your whole gospel on a stone tablet would have been more than a bit difficult.”

“It’d look impressive though, wouldn’t it? Like the Ten Commandments.” I entertained a brief vision of myself staggering out of our apartment and making my way to Central Park with an armload of stone tablets to bring the Gospel of Levi Who Is Called Biff to the masses of New York. I needed a long beard to do the thing properly. And some robes. I knew people didn’t wear them any more, but jeans just wouldn’t cut it. Maggie could clearly guess at the directions my thoughts were taking, because she smacked me in the head.

“No one reads anything on scrolls or tablets, stone or otherwise, any more. People read newspapers and magazines and those books from airports.”

Maggie was a big fan of books from airports. We’d seen enough to know that tawdry paperbacks weren’t just an airport thing, but that’s where we encountered them the most, and that’s where Maggie positively devoured them. (What did I do during our many hours spent in various airports? Drank at the airport bar, of course. Not just to get drunk! They’re prime places for talking to people, and I was trying to get a sense of people in this future.)

“Well newspapers are for news, and magazines are apparently for sex tips and gossip. And those airport books are all fiction. What’s the going format for holy revelation these days? Even apart from all that, would Christians even believe us? They’re not exactly following Josh’s teachings, most of them.”

And that was the bitter disappointment at the heart of our discomfort and lack of direction in this world. Besides missing Josh and missing our old life and missing any sort of divine guidance, we had to contend with what the church we had been building had become. I had taken one look at a crucifix in a Catholic church and walked right back out, determined to never step foot in another church again. After I read up on the history of Christianity, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to have anything to do with what had become of Josh’s followers. Maggie tried to assure me it wasn’t all bad, and she visited church after church in every city we went to. She listened to sermons and participated in services. She grilled the priests and pastors and reverends and nuns and monks and parishioners. The results were mixed. Sometimes she found the church the disciples had hoped for, but most of the time she didn’t. Me? I wasn’t going to find what I wanted in any of the branches of the modern Christian church. I wasn’t going to find Josh.

Maggie gave up on having theological debates with me months ago. She just looked at me steadily and said, “Biff, we will do what we can. We won’t give in to despair, and we won’t do anything so _stupid_ and _terrible_ as _killing someone_.”

I couldn’t believe she was going there, but apparently Maggie was ready to pull out the big guns.

“So, how do we spread the Word? How do we get people to listen to us? I know you can come up with something Biff: you were the one who handled most of the practical parts of the ministry.”

The compliment was nice to hear, since it had been something of a thankless task shepherding the apostles and disciples. Maggie may have always been thrilled with the disciples’ imagination and willingness to have faith, but Josh and I had frequently been driven to distraction by how just plain dumb they could all be. But it reminded me of how Josh preached to them: through parables and metaphors. An idea started growing slowly in my head. I had bitched often enough about how annoying the obtuseness of Josh’s analogies and metaphors could be, but Maggie had been right: the vineyard, the mustard seed, the fishers of men -- it was all just a scaffolding and frame for faith, the raw materials with which the faithful could build an understanding of the Divine Spark and their places in the world. What was today’s scaffolding for faith, then?

Plenty of people still considered the Bible or their holy book to be the foundation of their faith. But from what I could see, the batshit insane “Christians” who missed the whole point of Josh’s teachings were just building giant mansions of hate with their faith scaffolding, refusing room for just the kind of people Josh loved to help: the poor, the sick, the outcasts, the oppressed.

“We need to build on the scaffolding of faith, but everyone is too busy building mansions of hate!” I exclaimed. Maybe my metaphor had gotten out of hand.

“Oookay. I’m sure that made sense in your head, Biff. What exactly are you talking about?”

I flapped a hand at her, and stared hard at the blank television in our apartment, chasing my slippery idea. It seemed to me that a lot of people were finding their parables somewhere other than in holy books. After all, the parables as we heard them from Josh had a lot less relevance to the average modern American. They were from old stories and old times. The new parables…the new parables were in there, I thought, looking at the TV. In the TV, in the books, in the movies, in the music. People followed musicians like we had followed Josh and the Word. People waited outside in line for days to see a movie like the hopeful had waited for Josh’s sermons. When people weren’t lodging their faith and hope and passion in a religion or in a cause, they were lodging it with _stories_. Stories about superheroes and aliens and witches. Sure, they didn’t believe those things necessarily _existed_ , but it seemed to me like the fervency of faith was similar to religion.

Maggie, who had been staring at me with a certain exasperated patience, finally snapped and smacked me upside the head. “Spit out your great idea already!”

“Okay, so, people wouldn’t accept our gospels as the truth if we presented them as the real deal, right? Even if we prayed for miracles and got Josh to come down and vouch for us, we’d still kick off a million arguments and wars between churches and religions, and any message we’ve got will be lost in all the shouting and killing. But what if we don’t necessarily spread them like they’re the truth? What if we just tell our stories like…well, like stories?”

Maggie looked dubious. “They’re our gospels though. They belong with the rest of what they’re calling the New Testament, because they’re _true_. None of the others knew Josh like we did. None of the others loved him like we did. It’s important for people to see him through our eyes.”

Loved him like we did. Maggie may as well have torn out my still-beating heart. I swallowed past the sudden lump in my throat and moved on.

“Yeah, it is. But come on, they found Thomas’s gospel in some ancient trash heap, and no one’s rushing to add it to the Bible. What I mean is, people are acting like disciples of stories now. And with this internet thing, people don’t even have to be physically close to each other to spread a story. The stories just go _viral_.”

“We don’t know if our gospels will catch on like those popular stories though. You’re right, people nowadays are obsessed with some ridiculous stories. But how likely is it that our gospels will become like those Harry Potter books or Star whatever movies?”

“I’m kind of hoping for some divine intervention there,” I admitted.

Maggie sighed. “Well, I guess it’s as good a plan as any. How about we each choose a different method, try to cover more ground that way? It’ll be like when we split up and chose different regions to spread the Word in. And if it doesn’t work…well, there’s always the old-fashioned way.”

“The old-fashioned way sucked. Trust me, this’ll get us better results.”

*********

And so with the bare bones of a plan in place, Maggie and I split up to find our respective methods of distributing our gospels. I decided to start my search with the internet. The angel had given me a cursory introduction to it when he was trying to give me a crash course on the modern world, but he didn’t seem to understand it much. He mostly just showed me a lot of cat pictures and gave me a crash course on modern world history with it, and told me the rest of the internet was a sinful pit of depravity and vice. Really, that’s when I should have known the internet was exactly my kind of place. Sinful pit of depravity and vice? Count me in.

I decided to buy a machine that could a) get my gospel into a nice printed form that was the standard for most written communication in the modern world, and b) get me to the internet. The gift of tongues helpfully supplied the right name for this machine: laptop! Because I guess it goes on your lap? Not that the word in any other way suggests what it really is. English is really such an unhelpful language. Anyway, after the helpful and disturbingly cheerful store clerk showed me more or less how to set it up and use it, I was ready to go. I’m pretty sure he thought I was some of kind dimwit, but I just told him I was from a very remote village that didn’t have much technology. The remote village thing is always a handy excuse. It’s not even entirely a lie!

I took the laptop and its assorted accessories back with me to our apartment. It was still a little hard for me to credit that this sleek little machine could connect me to the whole world, more or less. And at least more importantly in the short term, it could get my gospel into a more shareable format than a stack of scribbled on hotel stationery. I started pecking away at the keyboard, typing up my gospel, but grew frustrated with how infuriatingly slowly I was going. I had seen others type with bewildering speed, but all I could manage was a pathetic two-fingered typing crawl. What I needed was a magi of the art of computers.

Except, duh, I had the _internet_. Which the angel and helpful store clerk had assured me could help me with _anything_. Granted, the angel had also said that every time someone used the internet for an unclean purpose, God smote a kitten, so I wasn’t sure how much credence I should give anything he said. But it was worth a try, so I laboriously typed, “HOW TO TYPE” into the search engine (not an actual engine, yet again unhelpful, English). I chose the first result that promised to teach me how to type, with games even, which was more than I could say for any of the magi. And thus began my journey to computer literacy, and my path to what passes for internet fame.

*********

Once I mastered what I felt was basic computer literacy, it took me a few days of almost non-stop typing to get my gospel in digital form. And okay, part of “mastering basic computer literacy” was, frankly, masturbating to the plentiful pornography that seemed to abound on the internet. What, I was reliably informed that the Internet Is For Porn!

I wasn’t just seeking out increasingly kinky and disturbing porn though. I was also catching up on a decade or so worth of internet history and culture. Compared to the two millennia worth of human history I’d had to catch up with, it seemed easy enough. But time seemed to move _faster_ on the internet, as if one internet year was the equivalent of two actual months. I resigned myself to being considered a perpetual n00b. (Helpfully, the gift of tongues does in fact cover 1337speak and LOLcat. It does not cover whatever language those commenters on Youtube are speaking though.)

N00b or not, I was feeling pretty attached to the internet in all its immature, troll-filled, diverse glory, and I was catching on enough to narrow down some possibilities for spreading my gospel. Inspired by Raziel’s obsession with Spiderman, I had briefly considered illustrating my gospel and making it a webcomic, but what with my minimal skill at drawing, I thought I should pass on that option. I also discarded the options of vlogging it, tweeting it, Chatrouletting it, and posting it to messageboards. Which really didn’t leave me with much, I had to admit.

Meanwhile, Maggie was still exploring her options, but she had followed my lead and typed her gospel up too. Which meant we had to face the hard part again: what should we do with them?

“So, what method are you choosing, Biff?”

“The internet. I think I’m in love with it.”

Maggie narrowed her eyes and said, “Don’t think I haven’t heard you using it for unclean purposes, Levi bar Alphaeus. You have got to stop thinking with your dick all the time.”

“You seemed to appreciate it last night,” I leered, which got me a glare and smack on the head.

“I’m telling you Maggie, if the Lord smote a kitten every time a man used the wonders of the internet for a little gratification, there would be no cats left! Anyway, it’s _research._ ”

That was, needless to say, a total and complete lie. But come on, _all that readily available pornography_. Do you know what a man had to do for some pornography back in 0 AD? The woodcuts in the Kama Sutra were all well and good, but they didn’t have sound and moving pictures.

“Seriously Biff, what have you spent all this time doing? Have you chosen a method or not?”

“I’m going to blog it. You?” I did not admit to Maggie that I had more or less reached blogging as a method through process of elimination. I didn’t even know how or where I was going to start a blog.

“I think I’m going to publish it as a book.”

“…As a new book of the Bible? Because then you still run into the whole no one believes you, being stoned in the streets kind of problem.”

Maggie scowled. “I’m working on the specifics! I’m getting some help from some of the people at that church I’ve been going to.”

“One of the terrible ones or one of the halfway decent ones?” I asked suspiciously. I wasn’t a big fan of most of the churches I had visited when Maggie dragged me along to them.

“One of the ones you liked, and one of the ones that has women pastors. You said they understood the Divine Spark. Anyway, I mentioned to some people there that I’m writing a book, and one of them works for a publisher and promised to help me.”

“Huh. Maybe we can actually do this thing.”

Maggie just sighed and looked at me a little sadly. “For once, Biff, have a little faith.”

*********

“Have a little faith.” It was easier said than done. Though my light-hearted tales of my travels around the globe with Josh may have been somewhat more silent on that count, I was well aware of my main failing as a disciple of the Messiah. Besides the copious sinning and the general lack of reverence, I hadn’t had much in the way of faith. When it came down to it, I had given in to despair. I couldn’t let Josh down again that way.

So I had a little faith, and asked the ever helpful magi that was Google to point me towards a blog service, and picked the first “Do you feel lucky?” result. After some simple clicking and typing, I had my very own blog, creatively titled: The Blog and Gospel of Levi Who Is Called Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. With my gospel already all typed up, all I had to do was post a bit of it everyday, and wait and see what happened.

So I started my first post with the first words of my gospel as I had written them after I was freshly resurrected, while under guard by the stupidest angel in the heavens:

 _“You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don’t. Trust me, I was there. I know._

 _The first time I saw the man who would save the world he was sitting near the central well in Nazareth with a lizard hanging out of his mouth…”_

I sent the words out into world to be transformed into bytes, then transformed back into words again as, hopefully, people read them. _Josh_ , I thought, _I’m trying here. Maybe you could help me out a little? Work a little of your messiah magic?_ As ever, the only reply I received was silence.

*********

A couple of days into my attempts to disseminate my gospel via blog, Maggie burst into the apartment, and slammed a book down on the kitchen table. I looked up from my constant refreshing of my blog to check for comments, and peered at the book.

“Is that your gospel?”

“Don’t be ridiculous Biff, of course I couldn’t get it published that quickly. But this, this piece of crap gave me my idea!”

The offending piece of crap was titled _The Da Vinci Code_ , and was by some guy named Dan Brown. I vaguely remembered seeing it all over airport terminals in the hands of bored travelers.

“What’s your idea then?”

“So, this thing is a _total pile of camel shit_. It’s all about some man’s attempts to uncover some grand conspiracy to cover up my place in the Bible.”

“But there kind of was a conspiracy to cover up your place in the Bible…”

“Well, yeah, but _listen_. There’s all this nonsense about obscure codes hidden in famous art and random churches in France of all places, and it says Josh and me had kids!”

I still wasn’t entirely seeing what exactly made this all a steaming pile of camel shit other than the fact that it wasn’t true. As far as whacky religious ideas went, none of this sounded all that out there. And having Josh’s kids was a better version of Maggie’s story than being a prostitute, even if it did ignite my jealous instincts.

Maggie could see I wasn’t really following her, so she continued, “This thing sold _millions_ of copies. And it’s totally terrible! The writing is awful, the characters are boring, and the only thing it has going for it is what passes for a shocking scandal about me and Josh. Just think, if this mess can become so popular, what about my gospel? My gospel is _actually_ edgy and groundbreaking! It really does bring a whole new perspective to the Bible and Josh!”

“You’re okay with publishing your gospel as fiction then?”

“Whatever! So long as I can _crush this Dan Brown goatfucker._ ”

“Um. Sounding a little possessed by demons there, Maggie.”

“And of course, so long as it spreads the Word far and wide,” amended Maggie piously.

“Of course.”

*********

As Maggie embarked on her mission to get published, my blog finally started to get a trickle of visitors. I began to get comments that weren’t spam about enlarging my penis or purchasing vicodin:

 _Lol funny blog. If ur pretending to write part of the bible though, u shuld sound more oldtmiey._

 _This is blasphemy. I hope you’re ashamed of yourself for defiling our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ this way. You must pray for salvation, not write these disgusting lies…._

 _Cute idea, but you’re not exactly in line with modern-day biblical scholarship…._

 _Is this some viral marketing thing for a book or movie? I’m getting Dogma vibes from this, it’d be awesome if Kevin Smith was working on a sequel…._

 _U should totes write a book with this stuff, ur sooooooo funny! Lololol._

The comments weren’t exactly what I was hoping for, but as the days passed, I was getting more and more of them with every post. People were linking to me. I didn’t even know how people had gotten to my blog in the first place. Divine intervention was starting to seem more plausible.

The more I posted of my gospel, the more comments I got, and they began to be the kind of comments that suggested my gospel was doing something more than just entertaining bored web surfers:

 _Y’know, I haven’t been to church in years, but if they preached about this kind of Jesus, I’d be a hell of a lot more interested…._

 _I know this is supposed to be a joke, but I’m actually finding my faith strengthened by this portrayal of Jesus as a man…_

Plenty of raging arguments broke out too. The “Christians” who liked to build mansions of hate on their faith scaffolding seemed to like actively looking for things that enraged them, and I got a kick out of trolling them. I took inspiration from Josh, and attempted some parables at them:

 _Your faith is like unto a scaffolding for a house. You must use it to build a house worthy of that faith: a house that seeks to shelter and grant hospitality, that grows in love and family, not in goods and hate._

 _I’m betting you’re too dumb to get that though. Basically, stop being hateful little fuckers. Josh wouldn’t be cool with that._

Batshit crazy “Christians” aside, my blog was getting popular as more than just a handy place to get in a religious flamewar. The link was making its way around the world in a way the spoken Word never could. Random famous authors and bloggers were linking to me, and I was getting my fifteen minutes of internet fame. Maybe this wasn’t the way Josh had ever intended for my gospel to be heard, but it was working. And if people didn’t believe I was the real deal…well, you win some, you lose some.

*********

A couple of weeks after coming up with her “crush that goatfucker Dan Brown” plan, Maggie hit similar success with her gospel. I _definitely_ suspected the Hand of Josh then: terrible quality of a majority of airport novels aside, it seemed less than likely that Maggie’s gospel would find a publisher so quickly. But it had, and I’m sure you’ve heard of it by now:

 _From a thrilling new voice in literature comes a daring and original take on the story of Mary Magdalene. Maggie Adler’s Magdalene Rising follows the life of Mary Magdalene from her birth to her role as an early leader of Christianity. Adler brings both poignancy and humor to the life of the Magdalene as she portrays her struggles as a bold and outspoken woman in ancient Judea. The familiar figures of Jesus Christ and his Apostles are brought vividly to life in all their humanity and divinity…_

Needless to say, you should totally buy the book, because a) I’m in it, b) it’s a gospel, tape it to your Bibles, and c) that’s my girl! Also, you’ll be contributing to us fulfilling our divine mission and shit. Hey, even temporally displaced and resurrected disciples of Jesus Christ need validation.

Anyway, I’m making it all seem easy now, but at the time, Maggie had a lot of fights with her editors and publisher. They wanted to insert a love triangle with Josh to make it more edgy, and I guess because every book with a female main character needs to have a love triangle. Maggie was of course not on board with this, because while she was in love with Josh, Josh stayed celibate and free of romantic attachment his entire time on Earth. Trying to pass her gospel off as fiction aside, Maggie wasn’t about to make such a huge change in her gospel’s portrayal of Josh.

She basically fought her editors into submission on the issue, and her gospel was published in the form you can buy it in now. Maggie would like it noted for the record that unlike all the other gospels which have had the shit edited out of them over the centuries, the only changes to hers were some superficial editing and structuring.

*********

I’m getting a little ahead of myself though. While Maggie was on the road to getting her gospel in airport terminals all over the world, I was posting the last parts of my gospel. I noticed that just like I had told Maggie when we were deciding what to do with our gospels, the story was enough for people. I was dragging out the most painful and terrible part of my life, and people were reacting to it just as they would to a beloved story. They expressed sympathy for me and Maggie. They got emotionally invested, and they saw Josh’s crucifixion in a new light:

 _I knew it was coming, but I’m still crying. ;_;_

 _My heart is breaking for Biff._

 _Y’know, my priest always focused on the crucifixion to a disturbing and graphic degree…this is making me sadder._

I had made it real for them, had brought it back down to one man on the cross and the idiot best friend who didn’t have faith and couldn’t let him go. I hope I’ve made it real for you. Because it all was. Real, that is.

*********

And so here we are. That’s how I started to write this blog, more or less. And I know you skeptics won’t believe me, and you’ll think this is just like any other bullshit, occasionally funny blog by some dude pretending to be a historical figure, and one of Christ’s original disciples no less. You probably think I’m a religious nutjob, or a deluded soul in need of guidance. But I really am Levi who is called Biff, and I really was Jesus Christ’s best friend and first disciple.

I don’t know what message or moral you’re supposed to get from my gospel. I don’t know why I was resurrected to write it. I obviously wasn’t the most faithful disciple. But hey, if you got something out of it, I guess that’s all that matters. I’ve told my story, and the parts of Josh’s story that were missing. Maybe you understand him a little better now, maybe I succeeded in making him a little closer to human to you.

And me? I think I’ve done what I was meant to do. And I’m pretty sure Josh is happy with me. His face keeps showing up on my food. Just this morning, I was making myself some toast, and when it popped out of the toaster, there was Josh’s face. And not Josh’s face like you guys think it looked, but Josh’s actual face as I remembered it, smiling a stupidly big grin. I laughed until I cried, until Maggie ran out to ask me what was wrong, and she saw the toast. We held on to each other and laughed and cried, and finally, _finally_ , I felt like maybe it was all going to be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> When Biff mentions the Gospel of Thomas being found in an ancient trash heap, he's referring to the [Oxyrhynchus papyri](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus). I figure he read up a little on what happened to some of the other apostles' gospels. Also, the excerpt from Biff's blog post is taken from the book.


End file.
